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TOPSHOT - This photo taken on September 11, 2022 shows a security person standing in front of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar (Energodar), Zaporizhzhia Oblast, amid the ongoing Russian military action in Ukraine. - The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in southeastern Ukraine is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and among the 10 largest in the world. (Photo by STRINGER / AFP) (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
A farmer harvests rice crop in a paddy field on the outskirts of Guwahati, India, Tuesday, June 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, records his video addresses in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023.
Chair of the NATO Military Committee Admiral Rob Bauer addresses a media conference at NATO. Headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. NATO Military Chiefs of Defence are gathered in Brussels for a two day meeting, where they will discuss the alliance strategy and the war in Ukraine. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
Standing on the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument, I heard President Donald Trump deliver his fiery address. “You’re never going to take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he said to the crowd, claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. I could see men climbing the trees around the park, dressed in fatigues with Glocks at their side, as I heard security announcements prohibiting backpacks, chairs, and flagpoles play over the loudspeakers. When Rudy Giuliani took the podium, I heard him say, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and the crowd roared.
I heard people chant “USA! USA!” as I marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Department of Justice. I even heard Jacob Chansley, now infamously known as the “QAnon Shaman,” roar, “FREEDOM!” as we approached the steps of the Capitol.
I wasn’t at the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. I was at the January Sixth Experience, a $40, three-hour Airbnb “experience” that promised to deliver the “definitive walking tour of the conspiracy and national security event of our lifetimes.” “See the sights of Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol,” the hosts advertised, “as you trace the steps of the mob that attacked Congress.”
[Peter Wehner: The GOP is a battering ram against truth]
That’s how I found myself, along with four fellow tour-goers sporting sensible walking shoes with water bottles in hand, following in the footsteps of the insurrectionists on a cloudy day last month. As our guide, Kevin W. Smith, recounted the lead-up to and events of January 6, he played the speeches and chants from a small Bluetooth speaker strapped to the side of his backpack, and showed us photos of those armed men in the trees and other insurrectionists from a binder packed with screenshots of tweets, maps, and more images from the day.
As we avoided sidelong glances from other tourists, equal parts intrigued and disturbed by this small group broadcasting Trump-rally speeches on its walk to the Capitol, I thought: Perhaps history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as walking tour.
Depending on whom you ask, January 6 was any number of things: an existential threat to our democracy. A slapstick fascist comedy worthy of mockery, not remembrance. Trump called it “a beautiful day.” In March, when Tucker Carlson still had his Fox News show, he aired selective footage of the riot, which he had exclusively received from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, aiming to warp perceptions of the event. “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said. To some conspiracy theorists, the insurrection didn’t happen at all.
The January 6 participants have also attempted to revise history. “I am a political prisoner,” Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, said at his sentencing hearing in May, where he received 18 years in prison for seditious-conspiracy charges related to his role in the insurrection. Pointing out that Rhodes had “prepared to take up arms and foment revolution,” Judge Amit P. Mehta replied: “You’re not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. You’re here because of your actions.” John Strand, who was caught on video pushing past a fallen police officer to enter the Capitol building on January 6 and later convicted on five criminal counts, declared, “I did nothing wrong.”
The appropriation and misappropriation of January 6 get at a deeper question: How should we remember and memorialize that day? Despite extensive media coverage, prime-time congressional hearings and an accompanying 800-page report, and more than 1,000 people criminally charged, nearly two and a half years later, we have no consensus about how to tell the story of January 6 and its aftermath. As Robert Costa, CBS News’s lead election correspondent, said recently, “January 6 hasn’t settled into the national consciousness as a significant event.”
Smith, a 40-year-old Republican “until I couldn’t be anymore,” believes that the January Sixth Experience is part of the answer. Smith's background as a former U.S. intelligence analyst informs the tour's treatment of the insurrection as a national-security event, which he likens to the British burning of the Capitol in 1814. Though he left government for the private sector in 2019, Smith watched the events of January 6 unfold from a “sensitive compartmented information facility”—basically Pentagon jargon for a “secure room”—in Northern Virginia surrounded by intelligence-community colleagues. “Though it wasn’t as much a surprise to me because I had seen it bubbling up for weeks, none of us could really believe what we were witnessing,” Smith told me.
[Adam Serwer: The January 6 deniers are going to lose]
Smith delivers the tour with the quiet authority of a national-park ranger. He’s distilled the immense amount of information, social-media posts, and other noise from that day into digestible chunks and entertaining anecdotes. Since he began the tours on January 7 of this year, just after the insurrection’s two-year anniversary, Smith has conducted five of them. He says the cost of admission will go toward technological improvements (large-screen tablets to play videos, a louder speaker) and eventually toward hiring an additional guide or two.
On official tours of the Capitol, guides can mention January 6 only if asked, “a policy that in many ways reflects a country at odds with itself, unable to agree on fact and truth and reluctant to engage on the history of a day that threatened democracy,” Joe Heim wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year. This frustrated Smith. “How are you just gonna not talk about this thing?” Smith asked me. “It is part of our history; it is part of this building. We should talk about it, instead of just pretending it didn’t happen or bickering over it.”
Similar frustrations led the producers and writers of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah to develop a tour of their own. “It feels like there’s an active effort made by each party to either forget it, bury it, or downplay it,” Jocelyn Conn, a producer of the show, told me. “The government can’t even agree on whether we should memorialize it, because they can’t agree on the facts right now.” So last summer, they launched “In the Footsteps of the Freedomsurrection,” a self-guided audio tour that offers “a brand-new way to relive the magic” of the insurrection. The Daily Show team hopes that these installations and stunts, much like its Trump Twitter presidential library and mock January 6 monuments, will keep the true story of the riot from getting lost.
The humorous treatment draws out the absurdity of the day. Hearing along The Daily Show tour that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri sold mugs with an image of himself cheering on the rioters literally stopped me in my tracks, prompting me to ask myself, Did that really happen? (It did.) “We’re just like, ‘Here’s what happened, and this is why it’s funny.’ And if you can’t laugh at things, you’re gonna cry or feel outraged,” Jen Flanz, the program’s showrunner, told me.
Walking tours seem especially well suited to offer clarity. Michael Epstein, an expert in place-based storytelling and the founder of Walking Cinema, says that certain issues, such as climate change and gentrification, are difficult to continually engage with because they can seem hopeless. But presenting the story in an entertaining and dynamic way can unlock something. Walking tours can “put your mind in a world like a good novel,” Epstein told me. According to Conn, “To see it for yourself is a whole different way of experiencing it, than to see the coverage on television.”
I’ve written about January 6 for the website Lawfare, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of a tour, but I was engaged in a new way by hearing the ambient sounds of the crowd, and seeing the sturdy wrought-iron light pole at the Capitol that rioters had felled. Listening to a Kimberly Guilfoyle speech in public felt like a small price to pay for authenticity.
Yet walking tours have their obvious limits in the culture wars. When I first reached out to Smith after stumbling on the January Sixth Experience, its name made me think the tour was more of an insurrection reenactment for the MAGA set than a deeply researched anti-disinformation project.
Maybe there are people seeking the MAGA experience, but they haven’t ended up on Smith’s tour just yet. “Everybody there was on the same page,” he said.
It sometimes seemed like Smith was preaching to the choir; many of his more unsavory anecdotes from January 6 elicited disapproving head shakes and tsk-tsks. Amelia, an active-duty Air Force service member who first heard about January 6 from her mother while stationed in South Korea, told me that she was attending the tour for a second time after troubling conversations with her more right-wing colleagues. “All of us here are obviously of the same mind,” she said, and no one on the tour disagreed. (She asked that her last name not be used.)
[Conor Friedersdorf: The contested significance of January 6]
Another woman, Scarlett Bunting, who was previewing the tour for her women’s social club, the Belles, worried that some of the members who support Trump would find the tour offensive. She wondered aloud if Smith could “tailor” the content.
Smith welcomes doubters, but his aim isn’t necessarily to change anyone’s mind. “I don’t approach this as a Democrat trying to tear apart a narrative,” he told us on the tour, describing his “forensic” approach. “I barely even said the word Republican today, right? It doesn’t matter to me. There was a perpetrator, and this is a crime scene.”
The Daily Show had a similar sense of mission. “We’re not out there trying to convert anyone to think anything,” Flanz said. Her colleague, a co–executive producer named Ramin Hedayati, agreed: “We just wanted to remind people that this was a bad thing that happened. And we should not forget that.”
Smith told me he sees a “promise of transformation” in presenting people with these facts. He imagines people going on his tour and then returning to their “living rooms and front porches and Facebook groups.”
“It’s about making January 6 feel more real to you as a person who cares about the country,” he said. “Giving you an emotional (and also factual) base for engaging with people who trust you and could be influenced by your sincere views.”
Along the tour, we walked past the National Archives, just as the insurrectionists did. Two 65-ton statues flank the entrance: A wizened old man sits with a closed book on his lap, Study the Past etched into the plinth beneath him; across from him, a young woman sits with an open book, most of its pages still blank, and under her the Shakespeare quote “What is Past is Prologue.” Smith likes this stop of the tour best. “My personal mission, if there is one, is embodied by those two statues,” he told me. “We have to be mindful of what happened on January 6, 2021; what that tells us about where we are as a society; and what it could mean for our future.”
This article was originally published by Quanta.
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of tropical forest on the planet. They began counting every tree that had a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks, and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings, and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets.
As they looked at the data accumulating year after year, they began to notice something odd. With some 300 species, the tree diversity on the tiny 15-square-kilometer island was staggering. But the distribution of trees among those species was also heavily lopsided, with most of the trees belonging to only a few species.
Since those early studies, that overstuffed, highly uneven pattern has been seen repeatedly in ecosystems around the world, particularly in rainforests. The ecologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA, who was part of the team behind the Barro Colorado surveys, estimates that less than 2 percent of the tree species in the Amazon account for half of all the individual trees, meaning that 98 percent of the species are rare.
Such high biodiversity flies in the face of predictions made by a leading theory of ecology, which says that in a stable ecosystem, every niche or role should be occupied by one species. Niche theory suggests that there are not enough niches to enable all the species the ecologists saw to stably exist. Competition over niches between similar species should have sent the rarities into extinction (or led them to adapt to slightly different niches).
A new ecological modeling paper in Nature by James O’Dwyer and Kenneth Jops of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains at least part of this discrepancy. They found that species that should seemingly be head-to-head competitors can share an ecosystem if details of their life histories—such as how long they live and how many offspring they have—line up in the right way. O’Dwyer and Jops’ work also helps explain why one of the most successful ways to model ecologies often arrives at accurate results, even though it glosses over almost all we know about how organisms function.
Back in 2001, the paradoxically high biodiversity on Barro Colorado Island inspired Hubbell to propose the groundbreaking neutral theory of ecology. Traditional ecology theory stressed the competition for niches between species. But Hubbell pointed out that species might not really matter in that equation because, in effect, individuals compete for resources with members of their own species too. He suggested that patterns of diversity in ecosystems might largely be the products of random processes.
[Read: A basic premise of animal conservation looks shakier than ever]
For a theory that dealt with biodiversity, Hubbell’s neutral theory was sparse. It ignored variations in life spans, nutritional quirks, and other details that distinguish one species from another. In models based on the theory, every individual in a theoretical ecosystem is identical. Once the clock starts, the ecosystem evolves stochastically, with individuals outcompeting and replacing one another at random. The theory was completely at odds with species-based approaches to ecology, and it provoked impassioned debate among ecologists because it seemed so counterintuitive.
Yet surprisingly, as the random walks in the neutral models progressed, they reproduced key features of what Hubbell and his colleagues saw in their data from Barro Colorado Island and what others have seen elsewhere. In this modeling that almost perversely acknowledges no differences, there are flashes of the real world.
That tension between the models and reality has long interested O’Dwyer. Why did neutral theory seem to work so well? Was there a way to bring in information about how species function to get results that might look still more realistic?
One of the things that make neutral models appealing, O’Dwyer told me, is that there really are deep universalities among many living things. While animal species are not identical, they are remarkably similar at the level of, say, the circulatory system. According to a principle called Kleiber’s law, for example, the metabolic rate of an animal generally increases with its size, scaling as a power law—the same power law, no matter the species. (Several theories about why Kleiber’s law is true have been offered, but the answer is still debated.)
Given those signs of underlying order, O’Dwyer wondered whether some details of how organisms live matter more than others in determining how successfully species will compete and survive over evolutionary time. Take metabolism again: If an ecosystem can be seen as an expression of its inhabitants’ metabolisms, then the organisms’ sizes are special, significant numbers. The size of an individual may be more useful in modeling its fate over time than any number of other details about its diet or species identity.
O’Dwyer wondered whether one of those crucial, privileged factors might be captured by life history, a concept that combines species statistics such as average number of offspring, time until sexual maturity, and life span. Imagine a plot of 50 individual plants. Each has its own life span, its own pattern of reproduction. After three months, one plant might produce 100 seeds, while another, similar one produces 88. Maybe 80 percent of those seeds will germinate, producing the next generation, which will go through its own version of this cycle. Even within a species, individual plants’ numbers will vary, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, a phenomenon called demographic noise. If this variation is random, in the manner of Hubbell’s neutral theory, what patterns will emerge over successive generations?
O’Dwyer knew he had found someone who could help him explore that question when Jops joined his lab as a graduate student. Jops had previously studied whether models using life histories could predict a vulnerable plant species' survival. Together, they started to hammer out the math that would describe what happens when life history meets competition.
In Jops and O’Dwyer’s model, as in neutral models, stochasticity—the influence of random factors on deterministic interactions among the species—is important. The life histories of species, however, can amplify or reduce the effects of that randomness. “Life history is a kind of lens through which demographic noise works,” O’Dwyer said.
When the researchers allowed their model to progress through time, putting each simulated individual through its paces, they found that certain species could persist alongside each other for long periods even though they were competing for the same resources. Looking deeper into the numbers for an explanation, Jops and O’Dwyer found that a complex measurement called effective population size seemed useful for describing a kind of complementarity that could exist among species. It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this measurement was for two species, the more likely it was that the pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.
[Read: One of evolution’s biggest moments was re-created in a year]
“They experience demographic noise at the same amplitude,” O’Dwyer said. “That’s the key for them to live together a long time.”
The researchers wondered if similar patterns prevailed in the real world. They drew on the COMPADRE database, which houses details about hundreds of plant, fungal, and bacterial species collected from a variety of studies and sources, and they zeroed in on perennial plants that all lived together in the same research plots. They discovered that, as their model had predicted, the plant species that lived together had closely matching life histories: Pairs of species living in the same ecosystem tend to be more complementary than randomly drawn pairs.
The findings suggest ways in which species that are in competition could work well alongside each other without invoking distinct niches, says Annette Ostling, a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin: “The coolest part is that they are highlighting that these ideas … can extend to species that are pretty different but complementary.”
To William Kunin, a professor of ecology at the University of Leeds in England, the paper suggests one reason the natural world, for all its complexity, can resemble a neutral model: Ecological processes may have a way of canceling each other out, so that what seems like endless variety can have a simple outcome he described as “emergent neutrality.” Hubbell, for his part, appreciates the expansion of his initial work. “It offers some thoughts on how to generalize neutral models, to tweak them to put in a bit of species differences, expanding and contracting to see what happens to diversity in a local community,” he says.
This is just one bite out of the problem of understanding how biodiversity arises and why it persists, however. “In ecology, we struggle with the relationship between pattern and process. Many different processes can produce the same pattern,” Ostling says. O’Dwyer hopes that in the coming years, more data about the real world can help researchers discern whether effective population size is consistently able to explain coexistence.
Kunin hopes that the paper will inspire others to keep working with ideas from neutral theory. In a field where the unique qualities of individuals, rather than their commonalities, have long held sway, neutral theory has forced ecologists to be creative. “It’s kicked us out of our mental ruts and made us think about which things really matter,” he says.
Hubbell, who unleashed neutral theory on ecology so many years ago, wonders whether truly immense data sets about real forests could yield the kind of detail needed to make the relationship between life history and biodiversity clearer. “This is the kind of building on neutral theory that I was hoping would happen,” he says of the new paper. “But it’s only a baby step toward really understanding diversity.”
In a playful moment a century ago, the historian Carl Becker pondered this counterfactual: What if Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, had drafted the Declaration of Independence? A scholar of the American Revolution, Becker knew that such a thing was plausible. Franklin was, after all, on the Committee of Five in Philadelphia, which was allotted the job of drawing up the text in June 1776. A gifted writer of great standing, he was just the sort of person who might compose a document of such paramount importance.
Yet Becker thought the idea absurd. Although he admired Franklin for his “intimate and confidential” style, Becker did not believe that the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack could have written such sentences as “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” or “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” These lines were charged with a peculiar, arresting quality, mixing precision with poetry. This quality Becker associated with Jefferson’s “engaging felicities”—quite different from Franklin’s prose, which had an “air of the tavern or print shop.”
In fact, Franklin would have been very unlikely to produce the Declaration’s first draft. By 1776, he was too worn out by the strains of life to tackle the challenge. Also, as he later confided to Jefferson, he had made it a rule to “avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” because taking on a task of that nature was to invite trouble. Jefferson, then still 33, would learn the wisdom of this for himself when Congress debated his draft. First, on about June 12, he sat down at a traveling desk of his own design in the parlor of his lodgings on Seventh and Market Street and started work on the Declaration of Independence.
[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]
Franklin was, however, among the first to read Jefferson’s efforts, a week or so later—as was John Adams, who found himself “delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded.” From Adams, this was high praise, but there was also a hint of something else in his compliment. The “flights of oratory” certainly had luster, but did the words have real substance? Becker himself, in a close rereading of the “original Rough draught,” confessed that Jefferson’s prose sometimes left him with a feeling of insecurity, “as of resting one’s weight on something fragile.”
Nowhere is this sensation more present than in the Declaration’s most celebrated phrase, “the pursuit of Happiness.”
This appears in the second sentence of the document as Jefferson outlines his brief list of “unalienable rights”—“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The final four words have an instant aesthetic allure, but the longer one lingers over them, the more a riddle appears. Why has Jefferson denoted both life and liberty as rights, but not happiness, which is qualified by the word pursuit? Was this use of pursuit purely rhetorical? As the 19th-century lawyer Rufus Choate believed, was it nothing more than one of those “glittering and sounding generalities” designed to ornament “that passionate and eloquent manifesto”?
Many commentators have interpreted pursuit in this way over time. It adds rhythm and flourish at a pivotal early moment in the text. Others, however, have not been so sure. To the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., “the pursuit of Happiness” had real meaning, but not the meaning most readers recognize today. To illustrate his point, Schlesinger sifted through patriot literature by such writers as James Otis, Josiah Quincy II, James Wilson, and Adams himself. All of them wrote about happiness, though—unlike Jefferson—framed it not as something people should merely “strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right.”
The clearest expression of this strand of American thought came in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was drafted in May 1776. In it, Mason spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Mason’s text, which was reprinted in Philadelphia newspapers in early June, has long been acknowledged as a key influence on Jefferson. The link between the two declarations is plain enough, yet the crucial shift from “obtaining happiness” to simply pursuing it is not so easily explained.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]
In 1964, Schlesinger wrote a striking short essay titled “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” in which he offered a new interpretation. For years, he argued, people had been reading that line incorrectly. Schlesinger believed that when Jefferson wrote pursuit, he was using it in the word’s “more emphatic” meaning—as lawyers used to talk about “the pursuit of the law” or doctors spoke of “the pursuit of medicine.” This did not mean questing after or chasing down. Instead, it implied a person’s engagement with a practice or vocation already in their possession. Jefferson was not at odds with the other Founders at all, according to Schlesinger, but in his reading of the line the shift in meaning was significant: Some of the romantic sense of mission, some of the novelty of its idea of itself, was gone.
“The pursuit of Happiness” may be pure rhetoric, as Choate believed, or it may have a lost meaning, as Schlesinger argued, but there is a third interpretation we should consider. The age of Enlightenment out of which the United States arose was abuzz with discussions of happiness. What was it? How best to acquire it? Debating clubs churned over these issues. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson came up with complex formulas involving human qualities such as “benevolence” (B), “ability” (A), “self-love” (S), and “interest” (I) to create the conditions for what he termed the “moment of good” (M). (One part of his workings went M = B + S x A = BA.) Others relied on experience more than theory. Having encountered the Indigenous people of New Holland (modern-day Australia) for the first time, Captain Cook sailed away mulling, ungrammatically, whether they were “far more happier than we Europeans.”
But the author who wrote with the most intensity about happiness during the Revolutionary period was Samuel Johnson. Johnson was someone all of the Founders knew well. Ever since the reproduction of parts of his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1750, his work had found a ready audience in the colonies. As the historian James G. Basker has pointed out, “Johnson was a part of the consciousness of every literate American during the Founding Era.” And for Jefferson, he notes in particular, “the connection was unusually subtle and sustained.”
As a young man, Jefferson sought out Johnson’s political tracts. He recommended Johnson’s Dictionary as a necessary addition to the library a friend was constructing, and he always made sure he had a copy to hand himself, whether he was in Monticello or Paris. Later, in a 1798 letter, he confessed to using it as “a Repertory, to find favorite passages which I wished to recollect,” although he added intriguingly, “but too rarely with success.”
This line captures something of the place Johnson occupied in Jefferson’s mind—often there, not always as a welcome guest. In 1775, Johnson had emerged as the sharpest British critic of what he called the “wild, indefinite and obscure” resolutions of the Continental Congress. Jefferson had felt the warmth of his prose more than most. Reading the copy of Johnson’s furious polemic Taxation No Tyranny that he’d acquired shortly after its publication that year, the slave-owning Jefferson would have been confronted with a distinctly personal taunt: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
[Read: Lessons from Thomas Jefferson’s failure on slavery]
Johnson’s admonitions did not just haunt Jefferson at Monticello; they also followed him to Philadelphia in 1776. The week that Jefferson arrived to attend the Congress in May, The Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a long letter about “Doctor Johnson,” his Dictionary, and the use of words as weapons. Jefferson would not respond openly to any of this. In politics, he and Johnson were as divided as could be, but when it came to another matter, happiness, there was an odd convergence between the two. Five times before 1776, in all of his major works—The Rambler, Dictionary, The Idler, the novella Rasselas, and the political pamphlet The False Alarm—Johnson used the phrase the pursuit of happiness.
That construction was not itself exceptional: As Basker observes, “it also occurs in other writers of the period and the question of whether Jefferson took it directly from Johnson remains tantalizingly open.” More notable, and important, is the similarity in how these two great figures thought about happiness. Time and again, Johnson stressed his belief that pursuing happiness was a natural human instinct. This impulse, however, came with a warning. To pursue was natural; to obtain was a different proposition.
Johnson demonstrated this distinction most powerfully in Rasselas, which was published first in Britain in 1759 and then in Philadelphia in 1768. This moral fable recounted the adventures of an Abyssinian prince who, with his colorful entourage, was always seeking but never quite finding happiness. Sometimes, their journey would be lit up by moments of hope; more frequently came disappointment. At one point, in a quintessentially Johnsonian twist, one of the characters cries out in exasperation at the paradox that confronts them: “Yet what, said she, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?”
As the literary scholar Thomas Keymer has noted, Rasselas provides a clue to help us unpick one of the most engaging and ambiguous lines in the Declaration. By 1776, Jefferson was already known for his “happy talent for composition,” but this was only a part of his genius. He seems, too, to have had the gift of foresight. In that line, he frames, eloquently yet economically, the kind of country this new republic would be.
It was to be a place of promise, but it would not promise too much. It could not be both the land of opportunity and a place of greater safety. Pursue happiness, by all means, but do not expect a guarantee of obtaining it. Already in Jefferson’s rough draft, “The United States of America”—one of the very first uses of this name—we can glimpse the emerging nation’s essential character.
That character endures to this day. The United States would offer those who wished to come the chance of bettering themselves. But like Johnson, Jefferson seems to have appreciated the risks of the quest. Who knew, especially in the perilous summer of 1776, what lay ahead? The “pursuit of Happiness” was enough.
Today we’re offering a brief history lesson (and a brief themed diversion). But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
With the Fourth of July comes all the complexities of collective observance—patriotism, fireworks, picnics, apathy, resistance. The holiday has always been one of dualities. It has also always been political.
After 1776, the day was celebrated throughout the Revolutionary War. “The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression,” the historian David Waldstreicher wrote in 2019—the year then-President Trump ordered a military parade, complete with tanks, to observe the day.
After the Civil War, Black Americans in the South transformed the date into a celebration of emancipation, according to the historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, complete with martial displays, dedicated performances, and food and drink. “The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out,” they explained in 2018.
In the decades after the Civil War, the Fourth gradually lost its civic character and was marked in many cases by drunken, raucous affairs, rife with gunfire, injury, illness, and death, our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum wrote in 2011. The public-health solution in New England? Massive public spectacles—bonfires—in lieu of smaller gatherings. Today, that tradition lives on in the form of public fireworks displays.
Whether you’re waiting for fireworks, working, traveling, or resting at home today, join us for another time-honored tradition: a game of trivia. Below are five clues drawn from The Atlantic’s archives.
“A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” this president observed in his first inaugural address, “but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
Assessing this film in 1996, Roger Ebert called it “in the tradition of silly summer fun, and on that level I kind of liked it.” Our staff writer Megan Garber wrote that it was, “in the era before cowboy diplomacy and the isolationist impulses that sprang from it, a comically blithe rendering of American exceptionalism.” (Bonus points if you can name the director.)
The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence contains a crucial typo that has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the document intended, the political theorist and scholar Danielle Allen has argued. This typo comes midway in the famous sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Can you complete it?
This country gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, after almost half a century of American colonial rule. “In 1776, the United States sought to escape the rule of one empire. On its way out the door, its representatives proclaimed that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. After 1898, the United States acquired an empire of its own. And between that latter outcome and the former words gaped an uncomfortable contradiction,” David Frum wrote in 2021. “That contradiction was no less apparent a century ago than it is today.”
This American author and abolitionist is perhaps best known for writing the anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a five-stanza poem that The Atlantic paid $5 to publish in February 1862), but she was also a noted pacifist and advocate for women’s rights. Her work for The Atlantic shows “the point of view of a woman before modern feminism—the point of view of someone who wants to pitch in but must do so from the confines of the home,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote. Her poem “The Flag,” for instance, goes:
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
Related:
In 1902, Bliss Perry contemplated the beginnings of American imperialism and the waning of patriotic spirit.
Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.
By Adam Frank
The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.
That’s the takeaway from [the recent] remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.
Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.
Read. Written on Water, a collection of essays first published in 1944 by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, whose observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history.
And if you want to pick up something new but only have short stretches of time, Morgan Ome recommends five essay and short-story collections that are easy to read at your own pace.
Watch. Crash Course in Romance, on Netflix, a drama series featuring an all-star cast of Korean actors that aptly depicts the pressures students face in hypercompetitive academic environments.
Play. Our new print crossword puzzle puts a fresh narrative spin on a classic, as our crossword-puzzles editor Caleb Madison explains. The deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes.
Three American presidents notably died on Independence Day—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—and one was born on this day. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who throughout his life wrote frequently for The Atlantic, shares this birthday too. Hawthorne even did a fair bit of reporting: In this 1862 essay, for instance, he traveled from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to interview civil and military leaders during the Civil War.
— Shan
When my family fled Vietnam at the end of the war, we had to leave so much behind: documents, belongings, even family members. My sister and I were babies then, and our dad, when questioned by American immigration officials, forgot the exact days we had been born. So did our uncles and grandmother. As my dad once explained it, birthdays didn’t really matter in Vietnam, or at least they didn’t used to. Instead, aging was measured by Tet, the lunar new year. Everyone moving forward at the same time. Later I would learn how common it was for refugees and immigrants in the United States to have two dates of birth, a legal one and an actual one. For my sister and me, our dad’s best guesses became our legal birth dates. Our actual birth dates were a question, and we wouldn’t find an answer for decades.
At some point in my childhood, my grandmother Noi decided that my birthday would be August 31 and that my sister’s would be March 2, a week or two off from our legal dates. We didn’t know if these were the actual days on which we were born, but because Noi said it, we went with it. My sister took the liberty of alternating her celebrations between her two dates, and over the years I saw that we would have to decide for ourselves what a “real” birthday meant. Still, growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I envied my friends who could cite details about their own birth, down to the minute. No one in my refugee family had a birth certificate. I spent years longing for what I thought of as evidence of my beginnings.
Instead, I had a card with the words resident alien on them. As I reached age 18, I would apply for American citizenship and eventually receive a certificate of naturalization that would allow me to get a U.S. passport—the ultimate proof of identity. I had no clue that birth certificates as we know them today were a 20th-century development, implemented as a way of keeping records of the population and a way to distinguish those who were born on American soil from those who weren’t. It didn’t occur to me, at all, to question the strangeness of being a living person having to prove that you had been born.
[Read: The strange origins of American birthday celebrations]
When I finally met my mother, who came to the United States as a refugee years after the rest of us did, I was 19. She was living in Boston, and we walked around Chinatown talking about construction and the weather. I had to work up the nerve to ask what she could tell me about when and where I’d been born, and what that had been like for her. My dad and grandmother could only ever say that I was born in a hospital—forget about the recording of time, or weight, or length. But my mother didn’t remember anything either. I have asked her about it almost every time I’ve visited her in the years since, as if she’ll suddenly recall. But she always looks at me as if to say, What difference does it make?
“Who knows?” she said, with a little laugh, the last time I saw her in Boston, two years ago. Another time she had said, “Why does it matter? You’re here now.”
Sometimes I’ve wondered if maybe my dad forgot when my sister and I were born because he didn’t think he would need to know. Or maybe he forgot because he needed to in order to leave his home, his country.
Secretly, I am always on the lookout for dual-birthday people. Because that is more than a coincidence, more than the brief euphoria of finding out someone else shares your date of birth. People with two birthdays share a specific history of migration and displacement. They carry a diasporic marker, a sometimes careful harboring of selves.
[Read: The lesson I wish I never had to learn about motherhood]
After my grandmother Noi died in 2007, my sister and I looked through the photo albums Noi had kept in her bedroom at my uncle’s house. She’d had these albums since the 1970s and ’80s, and the pictures were yellowed. She stored them in a drawer of a credenza, where we found a small box that I hadn’t seen before. It held her few pieces of gold and jade jewelry and more photos.
At the bottom of this box: two whisper-thin pieces of paper. Tear-off pages from one-a-day calendars written in Vietnamese and French. One said March 2. The other, August 31. On the back of the latter she had written my name.
Had Noi carried these with her all the way from Vietnam when we left, escaping the end of a war? Or had someone sent them to her? Why had we never seen these pages before? Had she forgotten that she had them? No one will ever be able to say. My sister and I just stared at them, at each other. All those years of wondering, seemingly answered.
It’s a gift, this knowledge, but at the same time I understand that it doesn’t change anything. As my mother told me, we’re here now.
I haven’t really celebrated my birthday since I was 10 years old. I had stopped wondering, many years back, if the birthday Noi gave me was my real one. The dates that stay in my mind are April 29, the day we became refugees; December 21, the solstice day my grandmother died; the days my own children were born.
Still, whenever I have to write down my legal date and place of birth, I feel like I’m slipping into an alternate identity. Like going by one name with friends and another with my family. Like how I never say “Ho Chi Minh City” when I talk about where I was born; I say “Saigon.” I have always held two birthdays in my mind. The legal one and the real one. I could be either/or. I could have a secret identity.
Maybe this slippage, this in-between, is what my grandmother was offering when she gave me my real birth date. Like so many Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, she looked forward more than back. She did not talk in regrets. She didn’t forget the past, but she didn’t live in it either.
When I look at the calendar page that serves as my birth certificate, marked with my grandmother’s handwriting, I cannot help thinking about the peculiarity of wanting to keep a moment of time. I know, better now, that birthdays are less about age and more about the fact of another year made, shaped, endured. Another year of being a person in this world. It is not an accomplishment, being born—that is, not our own accomplishment. But staying alive is. That’s what my family did, all of us, even if we weren’t in the same city or country. We lived in spaces as we were building them. We were looking, all the time, for a sense of arrival.
Nostalgia is usually an unproductive emotion. Our memories can deceive us, especially as we get older. But every so often, nostalgia can remind us of something important. As we celebrate another Fourth of July, I find myself wistful about the patriotism that was once common in America—and keenly aware of how much I miss it.
This realization struck me unexpectedly as I was driving to the beach near my home. I am a New Englander to my bones. I was born and raised near the Berkshires, and educated in Boston. I have lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now I have settled in Rhode Island, on the shores of the Atlantic. Despite a career that took me to New York and Washington, D.C., I am, I admit, a living stereotype of regional loyalty—and, perhaps, of more than a little provincialism.
I was awash in thoughts of lobster rolls and salt water as I neared the dunes. And then that damn tearjerker of a John Denver song about West Virginia came on my car radio.
The song isn’t even really about the Mountain State; it was inspired by locales in Maryland and Massachusetts. But I have been to West Virginia, and I know that it is a beautiful place. I have never wanted to live anywhere but New England, yet every time I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” I understand, even if only for a few minutes, why no one would ever want to live anywhere but West Virginia, too
That’s when I experienced the jolt of a feeling we used to think of as patriotism: the joyful love of country. Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence; nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred. Instead, I was taking in the New England shoreline but seeing in my mind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt moved with wonder—and gratitude—for the miracle that is the United States.
[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]
How I miss that feeling. Because usually when I think of West Virginia these days, my first thought tends to be: red state. I now see many voters there, and in other states, as my civic opponents. I know that many of them likely hear “Boston” and they, too, think of a place filled with their blue-state enemies. I feel that I’m at a great distance from so many of my fellow citizens, as do they, I’m sure, from people like me. And I hate it.
Later, as I headed home to prepare for the holiday weekend, my mind kept returning to another summer, 40 years ago, in a different America and a different world.
I spent the summer of 1983, right after college graduation, in the Soviet Union studying Russian. I was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a beautiful city shrouded in a palpable sense of evil. KGB goons were everywhere. (They weren’t hard to spot, because they wanted visiting Americans like me, and the Soviet citizens who might speak with us, to see them.) I saw firsthand what oppression looks like, when people are afraid to speak in public, to associate, to move about, and to worship as they wish. I saw, as well, the power of propaganda: So many times, I was asked by Soviet citizens why the United States was determined to embark on a nuclear war, as if the smell of gunpowder was in the air and it was only a matter of time until Armageddon.
I was with a group of American students, and we were eager to meet Soviet people. The city is so far north that in the summer the sun never truly sets, and we had many warm conversations with young Leningraders—glares from the KGB notwithstanding—along the banks of the Neva River during the strange, half-lit gloom of these “White Nights.” Among ourselves, of course, our relations were as one might expect of college kids: Some friendships formed, some conflicts simmered, some romances bloomed, and some frostiness settled in among cliques.
If, however, we ran into anyone else from the United States, perhaps during a tour or in the hotel, most of us reacted as if we were all long-lost friends. The distances in the U.S. shrank to nothing. Boston and Jackson, Chicago and Dallas, Sacramento and Charlotte—all of us at that point were next-door neighbors meeting in a harsh and hostile land. It is difficult today to explain to a globalized and mobile generation the sense of fellowship evoked by encountering Americans overseas in the days when international travel was a rarer luxury than it is now. But to meet other Americans in a place such as the Soviet Union was often like a family reunion despite all of us being complete strangers.
[Read: What if America had lost the revolutionary war?]
Some years later, I returned to a more liberalized U.S.S.R. under the then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was part of an American delegation to a workshop on arms control with members of the Soviet diplomatic and military establishments. We all stayed together on a riverboat, where we also held our meetings. (A sad note: The boat traveled the Dnipro River in what was still Soviet Ukraine, and I walked through towns and cities, including Zaporizhzhya, that have since been reduced to rubble.) One day, our Soviet hosts woke us by piping the song “The City of New Orleans” to our staterooms, with its refrain of Good morning, America. How are ya? It was like a warm call from home, even if I’d never been to any of the locations (New Orleans, Memphis … Kankakee?) mentioned in the lyrics.
Today, many Americans regard one another as foreigners in their own country. Montgomery and Burlington? Charleston and Seattle? We might as well be measuring interstellar distances. We talk about “blue” and “red,” and we call one another communists and fascists, tossing off facile labels that once, among more serious people, were fighting words.
I am not going to both-sides this: I have no patience with people who casually refer to anyone with whom they disagree as “fascists,” but such people are a small and annoying minority. The reality is that the Americans who have taught us all to hate one another instantly at the sight of a license plate or at the first intonation of a regional accent are the vanguard of the new American right, and they have found fame and money in promoting division and even sedition.
These are the people, on our radios and televisions and even in the halls of Congress, who encourage us to fly Gadsden and Confederate flags and to deface our cars with obscene and stupid bumper stickers; they subject us to inane prattle about national divorce as they watch the purchases and ratings and donations roll in. Such people have made it hard for any of us to be patriotic; they pollute the incense of patriotism with the stink of nationalism so that they can issue their shrill call to arms for Americans to oppose Americans.
[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev’s fatal trap]
Their appeals demean every voter, even those of us who resist their propaganda, because all of us who hear them find ourselves drawing lines and taking sides. When I think of Ohio, for example, I no longer think (as I did for most of my life) of a heartland state and the birthplace of presidents. Instead, I wonder how my fellow American citizens there could have sent to Congress such disgraceful poltroons as Jim Jordan and J. D. Vance—men, in my view, whose fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to personal ambition, and whose love of country I will, without reservation, call into question. Likewise, when I think of Florida, I envision a natural wonderland turned into a political wasteland by some of the most ridiculous and reprehensible characters in American politics.
I struggle, especially, with the shocking fact that many of my fellow Americans, led by cynical right-wing-media charlatans, are now supporting Russia while Moscow conducts a criminal war. These voters have been taught to fear their own government—and other Americans who disagree with them—more than a foreign regime that seeks the destruction of their nation. I remember the old leftists of the Cold War era: Some of them were very bad indeed, but few of them were this bad, and their half-baked anti-Americanism found little support among the broad mass of the American public. Now, thanks to the new rightists, an even worse and more enduring anti-Americanism has become the foundational belief of millions of American citizens.
I know that such thoughts make me part of the problem. And yes, I will always believe that voting for someone such as Jordan (or, for that matter, Donald Trump) is, on some level, a moral failing. But that has nothing to do with whether Ohio and Florida are part of the America I love, a nation full of good people whose politics are less important than their shared citizenship with me in this republic. I might hate the way most Floridians vote, but I would defend every square inch of the state from anyone who would want to take it from us and subjugate any of its people.
When I returned from that first Soviet excursion back in 1983, we landed at JFK on July 4—the finest day there could be to return to America after a grim sojourn in the Land of the Soviets. By the time my short connecting hop to Hartford took off, it was dark. We flew low across Long Island and Connecticut, and I could see the Fourth of July fireworks in towns below us. I was a young man and so, naturally, I was too tough to cry, but I felt my eyes welling as I watched town after town celebrate our national holiday. I was exhausted, not only from the trip but from a summer in an imprisoned nation. I was so glad to be home, to be free, to be safe again among other Americans.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Independence Day in a divided America]
I want us all to experience that feeling. And so, for one day, on this Fourth, I am going to think of my fellow citizens as if I’d just met them in Soviet Leningrad. Just for the day, I won’t care where their votes went in the past few elections—or if they voted at all. I won’t care where they stand on Roe v. Wade or student-debt forgiveness. I won’t care if any of them think America is a capitalist hellhole. I won’t bother about their loves and hates. They’re Americans, and like it or not, we are bound to one another in one of the greatest and most noble experiments in human history. Our destiny together, stand or fall, is inescapable.
Tomorrow, we can go back to bickering. But just for this Fourth, I hope we can all try, with an open spirit, to think of our fellow Americans as friends and family, brothers and sisters, and people whose hands we would gratefully clasp if we met in a faraway and dangerous place.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it.
“I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.”
It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him.
In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point.
But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.)
[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]
He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans.
Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen.
Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so.
But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too.
[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]
For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well.
Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too.
But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.”
For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.”
[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]
This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.”
Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all.
But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.”
Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened.
President Joe Biden is putting long-time Democratic adviser Gene Sperling in charge of helping smooth the upcoming labor contract talks between the auto workers’ union and Big Three automakers, a White House official confirmed Monday — a looming potential economic headache facing the president’s reelection effort.
In tapping Sperling, Biden is putting an economic power player and long-time manufacturing advocate in a position to win over a union that is openly skeptical about the White House’s push for electric vehicles. The effort could also shore up support for the president in Michigan — the state where Sperling was born and which played a crucial role in Biden’s election in 2020.
“As a White House point person on key issues related to the UAW and Big Three, Sperling will help ensure Administration-wide coordination across interested parties and among White House policymakers,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO. “Gene will work hand-in-glove with acting [Labor] Secretary Julie Su on all labor-related issues.”
The official was granted anonymity to discuss a matter not yet officially announced.
The United Auto Workers and its new leadership have chastised Biden for steering hundreds of billions of dollars toward incentives for electric vehicles, a policy that the union worries threatens its members’ jobs. Biden’s top Republican rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, has preyed on those anxieties to court support from auto workers.
That leaves Sperling with a full plate. UAW’s collective bargaining agreement with Detroit’s major car companies ends Sept. 14. Should the talks turn acrimonious, a strike could damage the economy and give Republicans fresh ammunition in the 2024 campaign.
Sperling has spent months advising the White House, including overseeing implementation of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. He has recently begun incorporating engagement with auto companies and the UAW into his daily role.
Sperling, 64, was the national economic council director and national economic adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry from 2009 to 2010.
While auto companies received a taxpayer-funded bailout in 2009, UAW leadership contends workers made huge sacrifices to help the industry recover from the recession. That legacy colors much of what is animating UAW President Shawn Fain, who has taken the labor organization in a more aggressive direction since winning a runoff election in March.
The UAW cited its concerns about the jobs implications of electric vehicles when it said in May that it was not yet ready to endorse Biden. It represents a blemish for Biden, a self-proclaimed car guy who has fashioned himself the most labor-friendly president in modern U.S. history.
Biden has pledged to make half of new vehicle sales electric by 2030. But the UAW has pushed Biden to attach more strings to federal investment to ensure companies that receive taxpayer-backed subsidies provide sustaining wages and better working conditions. The fledgling U.S. battery manufacturing industry key to making electric vehicles — and to which the Biden administration has steered tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies — has little relationship with organized labor.
The UAW has often referenced a 2018 study it conducted that suggested moving away from internal combustion engines, which have more parts and require more workers, would cost its members 35,000 jobs. Fain last month slammed the Biden administration for issuing a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build three battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee, where labor organizing is more difficult.
“They’re just raising an alarm,” Reem Rayef, senior policy advisor with BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups, said in an interview about UAW’s recent public comments. “That’s all great to put these jobs here. I think what we are hearing from UAW is, ‘That is great, but it’s not enough.’”
Gene Sperling, 64, was the national economic council director and national economic adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry from 2009 to 2010.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A federal judge on Monday blocked a new Florida election law pushed by Republicans that puts restrictions on voter registration groups, calling it “Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote.”
U.S. Chief District Judge Mark Walker granted a preliminary injunction against the law just days after it went into effect. Walker is an appointee of former President Barack Obama who has repeatedly ruled against the state in past legal challenges to election measures put in place by the GOP-controlled Legislature.
“When state government power threatens to spread beyond constitutional bounds and reduce individual rights to ashes, the federal judiciary stands as a firewall,” Walker wrote in his 58-page order that included a subtle jab at Gov. Ron DeSantis by invoking a catch phrase he often uses. “The free state of Florida is simply not free to exceed the bounds of the United States Constitution.”
The law, passed this spring by GOP legislators and signed into law by DeSantis, was a comprehensive measure that included a provision that cleared the way for the governor to run for president without having to resign his current position.
The legal challenges, however, came from several groups that register voters, including organizations that focus on registering Black and Hispanic voters. The new law includes restrictions on who could handle voter registration applications — blocking, for example, non-citizens even if they were legally allowed to work in the U.S. The new measure, which subjects the groups to steep fines, also barred organizations from retaining information about the new registrants. It also requires them to give a receipt when someone fills out a voter registration application.
Republicans and state officials argued the new restrictions were designed to crack down on groups that routinely turn in applications late and were needed to ensure non-citizens weren’t voting.
Walker, in his ruling, didn’t accept the logic of the state, nor did he agree to hold off on issuing his ruling while state election officials draw up more specific rules designed to implement the new law. The judge stated that Florida officials — while offering up proof that applications have been turned into late — did not demonstrate why the ban on non-U.S. citizens handling voter registration forms was needed.
“The state of Florida is correct to seek integrity in our electoral system,” Walker wrote. “Sound election laws ensure the people are heard without distortion from negligent and bad faith actors. Here, however, Florida’s solutions for preserving election integrity are too far removed from the problems it has put forward as justifications.”
Democrats who voted against the law, as well as the groups that challenged it, hailed the decision.
“Today’s ruling confirms what we knew from the very beginning: Florida’s latest voter registration law was unconstitutional and served no other purpose than to silence our communities,” said Frankie Miranda, CEO and president of the Hispanic Federation, one of the groups that challenged the law. “This ruling is a win for all Floridians — especially for underrepresented communities who rely on nonpartisan organizations like us to help make their voices heard. We applaud this ruling, and will not rest until everyone’s right to participate in our democracy is protected.”
DeSantis’ office, as well as legislative leaders and Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But in the past, state officials have usually been fairly consistent about appealing decisions by Walker, who has a mixed track record of success with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court this past April reversed a Walker ruling against a 2021 voting law that had placed restrictions on drop boxes.
The legal challenges came from several groups that register voters, including organizations that focus on registering Black and Hispanic voters.
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